Why Are We Back In Iraq?

A couple days ago I scoffed at right leaning blog claims that media photographers faked photos at the scene in Qana.

But, apparently, one photographer working for Reuters - who also took shots at Qana - has been caught by some of those blogs altering a Beirut photo:

Reuters withdraws photograph of Beirut after Air Force attack after US blogs, photographers point out 'blatant evidence of manipulation.' Reuters' head of PR says in response, 'Reuters has suspended photographer until investigations are completed into changes made to photograph.' Photographer who sent altered image is same Reuters photographer behind many of images from Qana, which have also been subject of suspicions for being staged

...

Earlier, Charles Johnson, of the Little Green Footballs blog , which has exposed a previous attempt at fraud by a major American news corporation, wrote : "This Reuters photograph shows blatant evidence of manipulation. Notice the repeating patterns in the smoke; this is almost certainly caused by using the Photoshop 'clone' tool to add more smoke to the image."

Of course, this doesn't mean that other photographs were necessarily staged or faked, but it does mean that the more times these things happen the more people on the right and the left and the middle will find less reason to trust anything they see or read in the mainstream media.

But that doesn't mean that blog or Internet publications will necessarily benefit, because there's certainly no shortage of misinformation and disinformation on the World Wide Web.

It will just mean that more and more people will have fewer places that they can turn toward to trust. And that's bad.

Reuters did act pretty quickly, so let's hope they put a lot of effort and time into making certain that this doesn't happen again and that all of the photographer's prior work is properly inspected to determine as much authenticity as possible after the fact.

And congrats to the rightie blogs that spotted the manipulation in this particular photo

# posted by Ron Brynaert : 8/06/2006 08:19:00 PM